BRECHT SOURCEBOOK
Bertolt Brecht’s career intersects a wide range of political and cultural practices and history including German folk culture, vaudeville, jazz, the rise of Hollywood and mass culture, two World Wars, Nazi Germany, the emergence of international travel, and the beginnings of global culture. As one of the most prolific and influential writers, directors, and theorists of the twentieth centuty, Brecht is mandatory reading for anyone interested in cultural and political life.
This anthology brings together an indispensable collection of articles, plays and interviews portraying the development and the complexity of Brecht’s ideas. Included are two plays not easily available in English: The Beggar or The Dead Dog and Baden Lehrstück.
The collection covers:
• the development of Brecht’s aesthetic theories • Brecht’s aesthetic theories in practice
• Brecht’s collaborations with Kurt Weill, Paul Dessau and others
• the adoption and adaptation of Brecht’s ideas in England, Japan, Russia, the United States, and Latin America.
This book is an ideal companion to Brecht’s plays, and provides an invaluable reconsideration of his work.
Contributors include: Lee Baxandall, Eric Bentley, Hans-Joachim Bunge, Paul Dessau, Martin Esslin, Henry Glade, Barclay Goldsmith, Mordecai Gorelik, Karen Laughlin, W.Stuart McDowell, Erica Munk, Jean-Paul Sartre, Ernst Schumacher, Diana Taylor, Tadashi Uchino, Kurt Weill, Carl Weber.
Carol Martin is Associate Professor of Drama at New York University, the co-editor of Studies in Dance History, the book review co-editor of The Drama Review and the author of Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s.
Henry Bial is Instructor of Drama at New York University. He is currently completing his dissertation on Jewish-American popular performance.
Worlds of Performance
What is a “performance”? Where does it take place? Who are the participants? Not so long ago these were settled questions, but today such orthodox answers are unsatisfactory, misleading, and limiting. “Performance” as a theoretical category and as a practice has expanded explosively. It now comprises a panoply of genres ranging from play, to popular entertainments, to theatre, dance, and music, to secular and religious rituals, to “performance in everyday life”, to intercultural experiments, and more.
For nearly forty years, The Drama Review (TDR), the journal of performance studies, has been at the cutting edge of exploring these questions. The Worlds of Performance Series is designed to mine the extraordinary riches and diversity of TDR’s decades of excellence, bringing back into print important essays, interviews, artists’ notes, and photographs. New materials and introductions bring the volumes up to date. Each World of Performance book is a complete anthology, arranged around a specific theme or topic. Each World of Performance book is an indispensable resource for the scholar, a textbook for the student, and an exciting eye-opener for the general reader.
Richard Schechner Editor, TDR Series Editor
Other titles in the series: Acting (Re)Considered edited by Phillip B.Zarrilli
Happenings and other Acts edited by Mariellen R.Sandford
A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the stage edited by Carol Martin
The Grotowski Sourcebook edited by Richard Schechner and Lisa Wolford A Sourcebook of African-American Performance: Plays, People, Movements edited by Annemarie Bean
BRECHT SOURCEBOOK
Edited by Carol Martin and Henry Bial
11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor and Francis Group
This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005.
“To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.”
© 2000 Editorial and selection Carol Martin and Henry Bial; individual contributions, the contributors
The right of Carol Martin and Henry Bial to be identified as the Authors of this Work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act 1988
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing
from the publishers.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data
Bertolt Brecht: a critical anthology/Carol Martin and Henry Bial. p. cm.—(Worlds of performance)
Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Brecht, Bertolt, 1898–1956–Criticism and interpretation.
I. Martin, Carol, 1952–. II. Bial, Henry, 1970– III. Series.
PT2603.R397Z56325 1999 832c.912–dc21 99–41388
CIP
ISBN 0-203-97955-9 Master e-book ISBN
ISBN 0-415-20042-3 (hbk) ISBN 0-415-20043-1 (pbk)
To
Sophia and Sam
and to
Acknowledgements ix
Contributors xii
Introduction
Carol Martin and Henry Bial
1
Part I: Brecht’s Aesthetic Theories 1 On Chinese Acting
Bertolt Brecht
translated by Eric Bentley
13
2 Theatre for Learning Bertolt Brecht
translated by Edith Anderson
21
3 An Epic Theatre Catechism Mordecai Gorelik
29
4 Are Stanislavsky and Brecht Commensurable? Eric Bentley
35
5 Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition
Carl Weber
41
6 Beyond Bourgeois Theatre Jean-Paul Sartre
translated by Rima Dell Reck
47
Part II: Brecht’s Theories in Practice 7 Gestus in Music
Kurt Weill
translated by Erich Albrecht
8 Composing for BB: Some Comments Paul Dessau
translated by Hella Freud Bemays
61
9 Actors on Brecht: The Munich Years W.Stuart McDowell 67 10 Bertolt Brecht’s J.B. Lee Baxandall 81 11 Baden Lehrstück Bertolt Brecht
translated by Lee Baxandall
87
12 The Beggar or The Dead Dog Bertolt Brecht
translated by Michael Hamburger
105
13 The Dialectics of Galileo Ernst Schumacher
translated by Joachim Neugroschel
111
14 The Dispute Over the Valley: An Essay on Bertolt Brecht’s Play The Caucasian Chalk Circle
Hans-Joachim Bunge
translated by Bayard Quincy Morgan
123
15 Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle Bertolt Brecht
translated by Eric Bentley
137
Part III: Brecht Interpreted Abroad 16 Brecht and the English Theatre
Martin Esslin
145
17 The Death of Mother Courage Henry Glade
155
18 Brecht and Chicano Theatre Barclay Goldsmith
163
19 Brecht and Latin America’s “Theatre of Revolution” Diana Taylor
173
20 Political Displacements: Toward Historicizing Brecht in Japan, 1932–1998
Tadashi Uchino
185
21 The Actor’s Involvement: Notes on Brecht— An Interview with Joseph Chaikin
Erika Munk
205
22 Brechtian Theory and American Feminist Theatre Karen Laughlin
213
23 Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese Theatre Carol Martin
227
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
When we began this project, we knew that the pages of TDR over the past 40 years would provide an incredible range of information on Brecht and how he was introduced in the U.S. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, TDR (then the Tulane Drama Review) was instrumental in making work by and about Brecht available to an English-speaking audience. Under the editorship of the late Robert W.Corrigan, the journal frequently published such work, including a special issue (T13) devoted exclusively to Brecht in 1961. Erika Munk, Managing Editor of TDR in 1967 and 1968, helped compile two additional special issues on Brecht (T37 and T38), which subsequently became the anthology Brecht (Bantam, New York, 1972). Many of the articles in this volume originally appeared in one of these three special issues, and we gratefully acknowledge the work of the editors of TDR.
We regret that the Brecht Sourcebook cannot include all the work by and about Brecht which has appeared in the pages of TDR. Given the rich source of material, we had to make many hard choices. We thank Talia Rodgers and her staff at Routledge and Suzanne Winnacker, among others too numerous to name, for their helpful suggestions on this book. We also thank those authors who contributed new work, or granted permission to reprint material published elsewhere to help us bring this collection up to date.
We gratefully acknowledge the many authors, editors, and publishers who assisted us as we navigated the murky waters of copyright information. Jerold Couture, attorney for the Brecht Estate, was especially helpful in enabling us to secure reprint permissions for the five Brecht-authored pieces in this collection.
Our colleagues in the Departments of Drama and Performance Studies at New York University have provided invaluable support. Two people deserve special thanks for their practical assistance: Cindy Brizzell (now at Yale) and Aitor Baraibar. The editorial staff of TDR, including Mariellen Sandford, Marta Ulvaeus, Julia Whitworth, Sara Brady, and Jennifer Chan, were also very helpful. A special thanks to Katherine Hui-ling Chou, whose comments on “Brecht, Feminism, and Chinese Theatre” were most insightful and generous.
Finally, without the support of Richard Schechner and Christine Dotterweich Bial, this project could not have come to fruition.
“Are Stanislavsky and Brecht Commensurable?” by Eric Bentley originally appeared in the Tulane Drama Review 9, no. 1:69–76 (T25, 1964); this piece also appeared in Thinking About the Playwright (1987) by Eric Bentley pp. 130–4, and is reprinted here by permission of Northwestern University Press and the author.
“Brecht’s Concept of Gestus and the American Performance Tradition,” by Carl
Weber originally appeared in Gestus 2, no. 3:179–85 (Fall 1986), and is reprinted by permission of the author.
“Prologue to The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” by Bertolt Brecht, tr. Eric Bentley first appeared in English in the Tulane Drama Review 4, no.2:45–9 (T6, 1959); this piece also appeared in Parables for the Theatre: Two Plays by Bertolt Brecht, translated by Eric Bentley (University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1948, 1965), pp. 99– 104, and is reprinted here by permission of University of Minnesota Press and Eric Bentley.
“Brecht and Chicano Theater,” by Barclay Goldsmith originally appeared in Modern Chicano Writers, edited by Joseph Sommers and Tomas Ybarra-Frausto (Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1979), pp. 167–75, and is reprinted by permission of the author.
“Brechtian Theory and the American Feminist Theatre,” by Karen Laughlin originally appeared in Re-lnterpreting Brecht, edited by Pia Kleber and Colin Visser (Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1990), pp. 147–60, and is reprinted by permission of Cambridge University Press.
The following articles, cited in the order in which they appear in this book, were previously published in TDR and are reprinted by permission of TDR/MIT Press and/or the authors.
“On Chinese Acting,” by Bertolt Brecht, tr. Eric Bentley 6, no.1:130–6 (T13, 1961). Additional permission granted by Eric Bentley and Arcade Publishing.
“Theatre for Learning,” by Bertolt Brecht, tr. Edith Anderson 6, no.1:18–25 (T13, 1961). Additional permission granted by Arcade Publishing.
“An Epic Theatre Catechism,” by Mordecai Gorelik 4, no.1:90–5 (T5, 1959). “Beyond Bourgeois Theatre,” by Jean-Paul Sartre, tr. Rima Dell Reck 5, no.3: 3– 11 (T11, 1961).
“Gestus in Music,” by Kurt Weill, tr. Eric Albrecht 6, no.1:28–32 (T13, 1961). “Composing for BB: Some Comments,” by Paul Dessau, tr. Hella Freud Bernays 12, no.2:152–5 (T38, 1968).
“Actors on Brecht: The Munich Years,” by W.Stuart McDowell 20, no. 3:101– 16 (T71, 1976).
“Bertolt Brecht’s J.B.,” by Lee Baxandall 4, no.4:113–17 (T8, 1960).
“Baden Lehrstück,” by Bertolt Brecht, tr. Lee Baxandall 4, no. 4:118–33 (T8, 1960). Additional permission granted by Lee Baxandall and Arcade Publishing.
The Beggar or The Dead Dog, by Bertolt Brecht, tr. Michael Hamburger 12, no. 2: 120–3 (T38, 1968). Additional permission granted by Arcade Publishing.
“The Dialectics of Galileo,” by Ernst Schumacher, tr. Joachim Neugroschel 12, no.2:124–33 (T38, 1968).
“The Dispute Over the Valley: An Essay on Bertolt Brecht’s Play The Caucasian Chalk Circle,” by Hans-Joachim Bunge, tr. Bayard Q.Morgan 4, no.2: 50–66 (T6, 1959).
“Brecht and the English Theatre,” by Martin Esslin 11, no.2:63–70 (T34, 1966). “The Death of Mother Courage,” by Henry Glade 12, no.1:137–42 (T37, 1967).
“The Actor’s Involvement: Notes on Brecht—An Interview with Joseph Chaikin,” by Erika Munk 12, no.2:147–51 (T38, 1968).
LEE BAXANDALL has translated several of Brecht’s works, including Baden Lehrst ck (reprinted in this volume) and The Mother (Grove, 1965). He is a former editor of Studies on the Left, as well as the author of Marxism and Aesthetics (1968).
ERIC BENTLEY is the editor of the Grove Press edition of Brecht’s works and author of Bentley on Brecht (Applause Books, New York, 1998), a collection of his writings on Brecht over a 55-year period. Born in England in 1916, he was inducted into the (American) Theatre Hall of Fame in 1998. His best-known play is Are You Now or Have You Ever Been (Harper and Row, 1972); his best-known book is The Playwright as Thinker (Reynal and Hitchcock, 1946). He is currently (1999) working on a show To Those Who Come After: The Voice of Bertolt Brecht with music by Weill, Eisler, Wolpe, and Milhaud. HENRY BIAL (co-editor) teaches in the Department of Drama at New York University, where he is completing his Ph.D. in Performance Studies. He is currently researching the communication of Jewish culture through American theatre, film, and television.
BERTOLT BRECHT (1898–1956) was born in Augsburg, Germany. His early plays, including Baal (1923) and Drums in the Night (1923), were written and produced in Munich, where he had gone to study medicine. In 1924, he moved to Berlin, where he began to develop his idea of epic theatre through such works as The Threepenny Opera (1928) and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1927, rev. 1930), as well as several Lehrstücke, or “teaching plays.” During the Nazi regime he went into exile, spending 1933– 41 in Denmark and 1941–7 in the United States, where he worked briefly in Hollywood. After being called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947, Brecht left the United States for Switzerland, before returning to Berlin late in 1948 to stage Mother Courage and Her Children (first performed in Zurich, 1941), which opened in January 1949. Later that year, Brecht formed the Berliner Ensemble, which he directed until his death from a heart attack in 1956.
HANS-JOACHIM BUNGE was, at the time “The Dispute over the Valley” was published in T6 (1959), the director of the Brecht archives at the Berliner Ensemble.
JOSEPH CHAIKIN, actor and director, was born in Brooklyn in 1935 and educated at Drake University. For nearly a decade, he directed one of the most influential experimental theatre groups in the United States, the New York City-based Open Theatre, which he founded in 1963 after working as an actor with the Living Theatre. Among
other distinctions, Chaikin is a six-time Obie Award recipient, including the very first Lifetime Achievement Obie Award in 1977; he has also been awarded two Guggenheim Fellowships, the National Endowment for the Arts’ first Annual Distinguished Service to American Theatre Award, The Edwin Booth Award, and honorary Ph.D.’s from Drake University and Kent State University. His book, The Presence of the Actor, was re-released by TCG Publications in 1991. Chaikin was the first American director to be included in the Cambridge University Press “Directors in Perspective” series on the world’s most influential theatre directors.
PAUL DESSAU (1894–1979) composed the music for Brecht’s Mother Courage. Dessau was born in Hamburg, Germany. After World War I he became a composer at the “Kammerspiele” in Hamburg. From 1919 with Otto Klemperer he was a conductor in Cologne. In 1968 when this article was originally published he had been living in East Germany for 20 years and working as a composer. He identified himself as a Communist.
MARTIN ESSLIN is the author of numerous books on theatre, including Brecht: The Man and His Work (1960), The Genius of the German Theatre (1968), and Mediations: Essays on Brecht, Beckett and the Media (1981). He is a former head of drama for the BBC and Professor Emeritus of Drama at Stanford University.
HENRY GLADE was, at the time his article appeared in T37 (1967), chairman of the Department of Modern Languages at Manchester College, Indiana, and the recipient of a Ford Foundation travel grant to study the reception of recent German literature in the Soviet Union.
BARCLAY GOLDSMITH teaches at Pima Community College in Tuscon, Arizona. He is a member and director of the Borderlands Theatre.
MORDECAI GORELIK (1899–1990) was born in Russia and enjoyed a long career as prominent stage designer in the United States. In addition to designing shows for the Provincetown Players, the Group Theatre, and numerous Broadway shows, he was the author of New Theatres for Old (1940), and an early advocate of Brecht’s epic theatre in America.
KAREN LAUGHLIN is Associate Professor of English at Florida State University, where she teaches courses in drama, women’s studies, and film. She is co-editor of Theatre and Feminist Aesthetics (Fairleigh Dickinson Press, 1995) xiii
and has also published numerous articles and book chapters on the works of Beckett, Glaspell, Fornes, Henley, and other modern playwrights. Her current project is a book-length study of pain, power, and imagination in Beckett’s plays.
W. STUART McDOWELL is Chair of Theatre, Dance and Motion Pictures at Wright State University; director and co-writer of 1913: The Great Dayton Flood, (American College Theatre Festival, Kennedy Center) with recorded narration by Martin Sheen, Ossie Davis, and Ruby Dee. Founder and Artistic Director of Riverside Shakespeare Company of NYC, McDowell has directed and translated numerous Brecht plays.
CAROL MARTIN is Associate Professor of Drama at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. She is the author of Dance Marathons: Performing American Culture of the 1920s and 1930s (University of Mississippi Press, 1994), which won a De La Torre Bueno Citation for best book on dance of the year, and the editor of A Sourcebook of Feminist Theatre and Performance: On and Beyond the Stage (Routledge, 1996). She is currently the book review editor of TDR (MIT Press) and the co-editor of Studies in Dance History, the book series of the Society of Dance History Scholars.
ERIKA MUNK is the editor of Theater, a thrice-yearly publication of the Yale School of Drama, where she is Associate Professor of Dramaturgy and Dramatic Criticism. Her most recent writing on theater has appeared in The Nation, the Village Voice, and the Brecht Yearbook. Her political journalism from Bosnia, Croatia, and China appeared in the Village Voice, where she earlier served as theatre editor and critic, 1978–90. In the 1960s and 1970s, she edited the journals TDR, Performance, and Scripts and published anthologies on Brecht and Stanislavsky.
JEAN-PAUL SARTRE (1905–80) was a French philosopher, playwright, novelist, and critic, who refused the 1964 Nobel Prize for Literature. His many published works include Nausea (novel, 1938), Being and Nothingness (1943), No Exit (play, 1947), and Critique of Dialectical Reason (1960).
ERNST SCHUMACHER, an East German critic, is the author of numerous critical works, among them Die Dramatischen Verusche Bertolt Brechts 1918–1933 (1955) and Bertolt Brecht’s “Leben des Galilei” un Andere Stücke (1965).
DIANA TAYLOR is Professor and Chair of Performance Studies at Tisch School of the Arts/NYU. She is the author of Theatre of Crisis: Drama and Politics in Latin America (University Press of Kentucky, 1991), which won the Best Book Award given by the New England Council on Latin American Studies and Honorable Mention in the Joe E. Callaway Prize for the Best Book on Drama, and of Disappearing Acts: Spectacles of Gender and Nationalism in Argentina’s “Dirty War” (Duke University Press, 1997). She has also edited three volumes of critical essays on Latin American, Latino, and Spanish playwrights.
TADASHI UCHINO is Associate Professor of Theatre Studies at the Department of Interdisciplinary Cultural Studies, Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, University of Tokyo, Japan. Now a contributing editor to TDR, he studied at the Department of Performance Studies, NYU, 1986–7 and 1997–98 both times as a Fulbright Fellow. He has written extensively on theatre culture both in Japan and in the U.S. His most recent publications include The Revenge of Melodrama: Theatre of the Private in the 1980s (in Japanese, 1996) and The Return of the Political: A Short History of American Avant-garde Performance Since the 1960s (in Japanese, 1999).
CARL WEBER has been Professor of Directing and Dramaturgy at Stanford University since 1984. He was an assistant director with Bertolt Brecht, 1952– 6, and a director with the Berliner Ensemble, 1956–61. He has directed for leading American repertory theatres and Off and Off-off Broadway, and was Master Teacher of Directing at NYU’s Tisch School, 1966–84. He translated and edited four volumes of writings by Heiner Müller, and the volume Drama Contemporary: Germany (Johns Hopkins University Press). His essays have appeared in all of the leading theatre journals.
KURT WEILL (1900–50) was born in Dessau, Germany. A composer, he collaborated with Bertolt Brecht on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny and The Threepenny Opera. With his wife, Lotte Lenya (1900–81), Weill emigrated to the United States in 1935 to escape Nazi persecution. In the U.S., his theatrical works included Knickerbocker Holiday (with Maxwell Anderson) and Street Scene (with Elmer Rice and Langston Hughes).
INTRODUCTION
Carol Martin and Henry Bial
Bertolt Brecht (1898–1956), born to a middle-class family in the German town of Augsburg, is a seminal figure in the development of political theatre theories and practices around the world. Brecht was a total theatre man: director, playwright, manager, theorist, critic, and poet. He challenged Aristotelian assumptions, developing practices and theories of how acting could consciously make spectators critical observers and active participants in the creation of meaning on stage and in the audience. Through the actor’s use of “alienation,” and Gestus, the playwright’s use of “epic” structure, and the spectator’s consequent active filling-in of the lfilling-inks between parts, Brecht reoriented twentieth-century understandfilling-ing of performance away from the authority of the playwright to the circulation of meaning among playwright, actor, and spectator.
Brecht’s work was formed in the political and artistic context of Germany in the early part of the twentieth century. Germany was capitalist and industrial but with very active radicals—both on the right and the left. After World War I and the signing of the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 which forced the burden of war reparations on Germany, limited its armed forces, awarded land to France, and placed German colonies under the control of the League of Nations, fascism emerged as a pernicious reaction and eventually controlled German daily and political life, including all forms of artistic expression. As the right gained power, leftist artists and certain kinds of popular culture grew more defiant in their practices.
Political playwrights like Brecht had to find an aesthetic and a means of production appropriate to the advantages and limitations of live theatre. Film had successfully usurped the portrayal of the “real” without the distractions of odors, dust, noise, chaos, and insupportably high production costs in relation to the number of potential viewers. Theatrical realism was outdone by this new medium. In Brecht’s view, much of German theatre was bourgeois and obsolete, no longer capable of treating the complexities of modern, tumultuous Germany. There were new political and social realities that needed to be addressed. Influenced by his reading of Marx in the 1920s, Brecht took the view that history is fluid, negotiable, and controllable. Instead of the Aristotelian model of tragic destiny, Brecht considered life as a dialectic between rudimentary existence and the complexity of living: “First comes eating, then morality”1 (“Erst kommt das
Fressen und dann kommt die Moral”) is Brecht’s famous maxim, explored in different ways in many of his plays.
To disrupt the sentimental identification of spectators with characters, Brecht challenged actors to address spectators about the characters and the contents of the play. Together spectators and actors would then reflect upon the characters’ situations as these were informed by historical and material, rather than psychological or spiritual, conditions. The epic structure of Brecht’s plays, influenced both by Erwin Piscator (1893–1966) and Sergei Eisenstein’s (1898– 1948) film montage theory, rejected linear narrative in favor of seemingly disassociated scenes, of which spectators had to make sense in much the same way as they make sense of cuts, dissolves, and flashbacks in film.
For Brecht, theatre was an occasion for rational thought, not emotional catharsis. But this does not mean that Brecht’s theatre was bloodless or without passion; his was not an intellectual theatre without feeling. Brecht’s early productions were met with both riotous approval and disavowal: audiences booed, cheered, yelled at one another, and discussed the plays well beyond the performance. Brecht loved it. He was after participation and engagement—in and about a new world order. He wanted his theatre to be politically engaged, economically viable, and aesthetically “entertaining.”
Brecht was by no means alone in his search for a new theatre. He was among many who moved to Berlin where there was a heady mix of both international artists and intellectuals and high and low culture. Brecht arrived in Berlin in 1924 when the city was a crossroads between East and West, a boiling pot of significant social, political, and artistic experimentation.
Max Reinhardt (1873–1943), for example, despite his illusionistic theatre being deemed dated by the 1920s, was still searching for new forms of theatrical expression. He was enamored with the black vaudeville he had seen on a trip to the U.S. in 1924. Shuffle Along (1921) with performer Josephine Baker (1906–75), music by Eubie Blake (1883–1983) and lyrics by Noble Sissle (1889–1975), was a revelation to him: it was physical, rhythmic pantomime with a unique kind of emotional expression. When Baker showed up to perform in Berlin, Reinhardt offered to train her.2
Piscator’s productions at Berlin’s Volksbuhne suited Brecht’s interests. Piscator defined epic theatre as the text of the play disclosing its sociopolitical circumstances. His productions featured technical innovations such as the use of film and dramaturgical agit-prop devices such as placards to disrupt conventional narratives. Brecht took from Piscator the term “epic” and used it to describe the theatre form he was developing. This was not just a matter of playwriting and dramaturgy, but also of acting and staging.
Popular culture was equally important to Brecht: as a boy in Augsburg he attended local fairs where performers used placards and narrated theatrical stories. Later, as an adult in Berlin, he became familiar with the sardonic cabarets critical of fascist culture; the films of Charlie Chaplin were well known; black American musicians such as Duke Ellington frequented the city; the comedian Karl Valentin
became a close friend with whom Brecht sometimes performed. Thus vaudeville, cabaret, sports, and circus were all fodder for his theories and practice; his evaluation of them was according to the needs of his theatre.
Though Brecht envisioned a theatre for the contemporary scientific age his work proceeded from, albeit indirectly, the experimentation of the nineteenth century. During this period two major dramatic movements were born: naturalism, in which new evolutionary and medical theories informed the struggle of characters to survive, established by Emile Zola and others; and (as distinct from naturalism), realism, which sought to represent the world as it is rather than as it should be. Realistic theatre used real objects on stage, and ushered in the aesthetic of the invisible fourth wall.
Naturalism and realism were mimetic and representational dramatic movements. There were also the symbolists who viewed art as a vehicle for mystical considerations and hence rejected both naturalism and realism. And there was expressionism, which initially sought to differentiate itself from impressionism by the overt portrayal of emotional experience. Both symbolism and expressionism portrayed interior states. Thus the genetic and historical considerations of naturalism and realism were either abandoned entirely or inflected with mystical or emotional rationale. Brecht’s early plays were expressionist combined with social content. The states of his characters were aptly portrayed as consequences of their material conditions, and the style of his actors was presentational rather than representational.
Brecht’s theatrical experiments in Germany would soon be cut short. As the Nazis gained power, Brecht and the circle of left-wing artists (many of them Jewish) with whom he was associated were forced to flee. Brecht left in February 1933 on the day after the Reichstag fire to settle in Denmark, his main residence until 1939.3 Brecht eventually moved to California in 1941, living in the U.S. until October 31, 1947, the day after his appearance as one of nineteen Hollywood witnesses subpoenaed by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).
In 1935 Brecht took a sojourn from Denmark to Leningrad and Moscow. It was in Moscow that Brecht saw the jingju (Chinese opera) performer Mei Lanfang (1894–1961) who fully embodied Brecht’s theory of acting, in which the actor consciously presents the behavior of the character on the stage. This examination by the actor of the character prevented the complete transformation of an actor into the role, creating instead a portrayal that included both emotional empathy and analytical distance. Mei embodied the acting theory Brecht had been developing: “Verfremdung,” translated into English as “alienation” and French as “distanciation.”
Brecht spent a significant part of his adult life in exile, living abroad as a stranger. He must have experienced a personal sense of alienation and distance; a sense of gesture detached from language, of the familiar being strange. He was not alone in this. Brecht was part of a large movement of intellectuals and artists across many national borders in many directions. Piscator, who also fled Nazi Germany, set up INTRODUCTION 3
his Dramatic Workshop in New York in 1938. Among his students was Tennessee Williams. Piscator returned to West Germany in 1951, becoming head of the Freie Volksbuhne in 1962, using epic theatre techniques of the 1920s to develop the German documentary theatre of the 1960s.
While German artists and intellectuals fled Nazi Germany for the U.S., many American intellectuals and artists had already aligned themselves with political movements abroad. Esther Sherman (1897– 1982) transformed herself by darkening her skin, wearing saris, performing Indian dance and changing her name to Ragini Devi. She authored Dances of India (1928), one of the first books on Indian dance, and then moved to India where she supported the Independence movement against the British. Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) left the U.S in 1899 to live in Paris, Berlin, and eventually Moscow, where she helped celebrate the Russian Revolution and the overthrow of the tsar with a performance at the Metropolitan Opera House.4 Josephine Baker (1906–75) was among American expatriots in Paris, and became an important member of the French Resistance during World War II.
The 1920s and 1930s were times when both the creation of indigenous art unique to specific histories and modernization were important to many, but they were also times in which, through international travel, artists gravitated to different aesthetic systems and political identifications. As Brecht’s work became known beyond Germany, his ideas were adapted to accommodate very different political and social realities.
Brecht’s approach to theatre can be characterized, in part, by a radical reinvention of existing performance forms. Borrowing freely from traditions both popular and elite, local and distant, he reshaped classic genres, texts, and techniques to suit his immediate political and aesthetic goals. Just as Brecht drew upon other cultures to help formulate his theories and practices, his work was adapted by theatre practitioners to suit their distinctive contexts. This two-way process of assimilation and adaptation resituates the subject of the movement of ideas and practice away from problems of interpretation to, in the case of Brecht, the problems of the circulation of political aesthetics in a global setting.
THE ESSAYS
The essays in this collection reflect the emergence of Brecht’s work beyond the borders of Germany and the German language. The circumstances in which Brecht’s ideas were imported and in which translations of his work were made is one of the stories of this anthology. Another story is the malleability of ideas in general and Brecht’s in particular as his work was adapted in Latin America, Japan, China, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union.
The six articles in the first part of this book, “Brecht’s Aesthetic Theories,” situate the relationship between Brecht’s travels—to Moscow, New York, Los Angeles—and the transnational movement of his ideas. At a formal dinner party in 1935, Brecht saw Mei, the celebrated jingju (Chinese opera) performer, give a
spontaneous demonstration of his acting. What Brecht saw Mei do confirmed his notion that disturbing the distance between actor and character was an effective technique for resituating spectators’ sympathies. Instead of “real life,” Brecht saw in Mei’s acting a manipulable system of signs and referents: a “transportable bit of technique”. This was especially significant in relation to Brecht’s emergent theories of “alienation” and of Gestus, actions that are both themselves and emblematic of larger social practices. In “On Chinese Acting,”5 written after Brecht saw Mei display his remarkable skills, Brecht describes his first encounter with Chinese opera. This article contains Brecht’s earliest published use of the now-familiar term “Verfremdungseffekt”, or alienation-effect, also often translated as V-effect.6
By means of his “alienation effect” Brecht sought a radical separation of actors from characters enabling each to operate independently. Actors should not “live” characters but “demonstrate” them to spectators. The demystification of acting technique was a key part of Brecht’s goal. For Brecht, acting should be both scientific and popular—demonstrative and clear, as he believed scientific hypotheses were. Actors should be in control and fully conscious of their technique, as Brecht presumed scientists were. Spectators could then respond with an expertise analogous to sports fans:
When people in sporting establishments buy their tickets they know exactly what is going to take place; and that is exactly what does take place once they are in their seats: viz. highly trained persons developing their peculiar powers in the way most suited to them, with the greatest sense of responsibility yet in such a way as to make one feel that they are doing it primarily for their own fun. Against that the traditional theatre is nowadays quite lacking in character.7
In “Theatre for Learning,” unpublished in Brecht’s lifetime, Brecht asserted that because technique is international, the theatre of New York, Moscow, and Berlin possessed certain similarities. This argument has perhaps come of age with discussions of globalization that have more recently recast our perceptions of local cultures. In Brecht’s time, however, the idea that technique could exist apart from nation and apart from any specific form, was unprecedented. While borrowing and adapting theatrical techniques was a basis for modern innovation of many artists in many places, Brecht’s conceptual framing of practice as transcending specific geographic locations points to his orientation toward international perspectives and a variety of cultural experiences. What was modern, for Brecht, was hypothetically without borders. Yet Brecht belies the implications of his idea when he declares that only in Berlin, and only for a short time, did “the modern theatre” find its most powerful expression: the epic theatre. The contradiction of wanting to claim international stature based on artistic practices with universal appeal and at the same time to construct an art form that demonstrates national identity also marks the career of many of Brecht’s contemporaries in both the East INTRODUCTION 5
and the West. Brecht seemingly thought globally, but his work was also very much the product of Berlin at that time.
As Brecht’s plays and theoretical writings were translated and published in English, a new group of practitioners and scholars attempted to identify the salient characteristics of epic theatre that distinguished it from other experimental forms. Mordecai Gorelik, a Russian-born American director, and stage and film designer, carefully explains Brecht’s ideas about epic theatre to Americans. Gorelik, the primary designer for the Group Theatre, was one of the first advocates for epic theatre in the United States. His “Epic Theatre Catechism” addresses “the many misconceptions [about epic theatre] now current among theatre people”.
Eric Bentley’s “Are Stanislavsky and Brecht Commensurable?” outlines Brecht’s ideas in relation to Stanislavsky’s System. Bentley argues that, despite seeming opposition, epic theatre and the Stanislavsky System do not necessarily present the actor with an either-or choice. Bentley reminds us that both approaches to acting must be understood in political as well as aesthetic terms. Most notably, Bentley describes the curious position occupied by Stanislavsky in the Soviet artistic pantheon of the 1950s. He sets this against Brecht’s uneasy relationship with the East German Communist Party as a way of explaining some of the perceived differences between the two aesthetic approaches.
Cold War politics played a part in the initially mixed and muddled American response to Brecht’s theories in the 1950s. But the roots of this response go back even earlier, to Brecht’s visit to New York in 1935–6 and his subsequent years spent in Los Angeles during World War II. Carl Weber recounts Brecht’s disenchantment with both Broadway and Hollywood’s commercialization of American popular performance forms. Brecht had initially respected these forms as fine examples of his concept of Gestus, but he later became disillusioned with them.
Finally in this section, the French philosopher, playwright, and novelist Jean-Paul Sartre (1905–80), in a lecture originally delivered at the Sorbonne in the Spring of 1960, applauds epic theatre as anti-bourgeois while questioning whether or not alienation is possible, or even desirable, if Brecht were to depict a society with which he felt empathy. Sartre’s first play Bariona (1940) was written for and performed by prisoners in a German stalag (POW camp), where Sartre was also imprisoned for his work with the French Resistance. Sartre felt, as did Brecht, that theatre was most successful at directly and immediately communicating the need for social action to a mass audience.8 Political similarities between Sartre and Brecht can be seen in Sartre’s plays (including The Flies (1943), No Exit (1944), and The Devil and the Good Lord (1951)), particularly in Sartre’s insistence on historicization and focus on dramatic gesture. But while Sartre’s dramas are subversive in content, they are traditional in form. The lecture “Beyond Bourgeois Theatre” was given late in Sartre’s career as a playwright, and represents an attempt to reconcile politically his own dramatic style with Brecht’s more radical aesthetic.
The second part of this book, “Brecht’s Theories in Practice,” examines how Brecht’s theoretical ideals were realized in his creative practice. Articles by composers Kurt Weill and Paul Dessau, both of whom worked with Brecht, depict the integral role that music played in his theatre, as well as the search beyond the borders of Germany for musical inspiration. In “Gestus in Music” Weill argues that music should magnify and focus the Gestus of a dramatic action. Weill’s illustrative example, “Alabama Song” from The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny (1930), shows the strong influence of American jazz on his compositions. Though this transcultural borrowing goes unremarked in the 1929 essay, it represents an early example of how American popular performance traditions provided source material for the Brecht-Weill collaborative team. Dessau, who wrote music for Mother Courage and Her Children (1941), The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1948), and other Brecht plays, describes how Brecht would suggest source material from a wide range of musical traditions. This was especially true for The Caucasian Chalk Circle in which much of the music was based on Azerbaijanian folk dances. Dessau’s orchestration calls for several folk instruments, including guitar, mandolin, and accordion.
In “Actors on Brecht: The Munich Years,” W.Stuart McDowell presents a series of interviews he conducted in 1975 with three actors from Brecht’s Munich productions (1922–4): Drums in the Night (1922), Mysteries of a Barber Shop (film, 1923), In the Jungle of Cities (1923), and Edward II (1924). Erwin Faber, Hans Schweikart, and Blandine Ebinger describe their experiences as the first actors to attempt to mold their performances to Brecht’s vision.
In his Lehrstücke, or “plays for learning,” Brecht was most directly politically Marxist. In these short often terse texts, Brecht tried to put his aesthetic and political theories into theatrical practice. Lee Baxandall characterizes Baden Lehrstück, performed at the 1929 Baden-Baden music festival, as a play which reveals Brecht’s personal political conflicts. Baxandall’s introduction to Baden Lehrstück is paired with his own translation of the text.
The Beggar or The Dead Dog is one of Brecht’s earliest known dramatic writings. In it, a beggar outside the gates of a palace confounds the Emperor by refusing to acknowledge his authority. Through the Beggar’s eloquent refusal to acknowledge the difference in status between the two men, we see a model for epic theatre. The Beggar dares to describe the Emperor and his realm in objective terms. The Emperor, representing the bourgeois audience, finds himself on the defensive without really knowing why.
Central to Brecht’s idea of epic theatre is Marx’s concept of the dialectic as an analytical tool. Brecht’s focus on cycles of historical development and change, informed in part by an “ideological super-structure” which is the theatre, led him to re-evaluate and re-interpret past narratives as a method for gaining greater understanding of existing social conditions, and how to change them. Though this approach to history characterizes nearly all of Brecht’s theatrical work, Ernst Schumacher argues that Life of Galileo (1943), one of Brecht’s most linear and plot-driven plays, actually comes closest to achieving this ideal of a dialectical INTRODUCTION 7
theatre. The way the plot of Galileo foregrounds the decisions the characters make stresses the mechanisms of social change. The dialectical construction of character forces spectators to consider their actions in relation to historical situations.
This section concludes with the controversial Prologue to Brecht’s The Caucasian Chalk Circle, which had its world premiere in 1948 at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota. In 1948, when Bentley published Parables of the Theatre (Minnesota), the first American text devoted exclusively to Brecht, the Prologue was omitted at Brecht’s request, in deference to his scheduled appearance before the House Un-American Activities Committee. The Prologue remained unpublished in English until Bentley’s translation appeared in the Tulane Drama Review in 1959, accompanied by Hans-Joachim Bunge’s essay “The Dispute Over the Valley: An Essay on Bertolt Brecht’s Play The Caucasian Chalk Circle.” Bunge surveys critical responses to the Prologue and argues that it is an integral part of the play, comparing the 1954 Berlin production—which included the Prologue— with the 1955 Frankfurt-am-Main production—which omitted it. This volume reprints Bunge’s essay in tandem with Brecht’s Prologue, though at the request of Bentley, a more recent version of his translation has been used.
Finally, part three, “Brecht Interpreted Abroad,” locates Brecht’s work in different historical contexts and geopolitical locations. Frequently, this involves the adaptation of Brecht’s ideas to meet local economic, aesthetic, and political needs. In his 1966 essay “Brecht and the English Theatre” Martin Esslin describes how the theatrical left interpreted and misinterpreted Brecht’s work during the decade immediately following his death. Very few English critics, playwrights, or directors had access to Brecht’s theoretical writings, as they were not widely available in translation until the 1964 publication of Willett’s Brecht on Theatre. Yet Brecht’s plays were embraced during the 1950s and 1960s, in part because the artistic vitality of the Berliner Ensemble provided an example of an artistically viable state-supported theatre.
Misreading is also the occasion for continuing interpretation and historical examination. Henry Glade suggests as much in his 1967 article on the production of Brecht’s plays in Moscow, where the political constraints of the Soviet regime led to many loosely translated and freely adapted productions. Following Brecht in his demand that the classics be adapted to the times, Glade finds that a syncretic blend of new theatre and old traditions produces creative and successful productions.
Barclay Goldsmith takes this a step further, as he identifies the Brechtian “spirit” of much Chicano theatre in the 1960s and 1970s. Goldsmith sees both epic theatre and Chicano theatre as political performances drawing on popular entertainment forms which depart from the conventions of naturalism. But, as Goldsmith notes in his essay, the political circumstances of Chicanos in the United States are vastly different from those of the working class in Weimar Germany, and this necessitates the need for significant differences in texts and performance conventions. Taken together the first three articles in this section portray how contemporaneous authors viewed significant developments in the
adoption and adaptation of Brecht’s work in very different locations in roughly the same time period.
Diana Taylor examines the reception of Brecht’s ideas in Latin America, where, despite the prevalence of his influence, it is difficult to identify anything as specifically Brechtian. Brecht’s ideas arrived in Latin America at roughly the same time as Latin American theatre practitioners began to turn away from European traditions in favor of indigenous performance forms. Brecht’s work was not widely known in Latin America until the 1950s, by which time a dialectical historically situated theatre had already emerged there. Thus Brecht’s theories reinforced directions already taken in Latin America where testimonies of violence were suppressed in a manner that made social truth and fiction, history and story, crucial subjects for theatres of social action. Latin American theatre had to provide the means for spectators to be skeptical witnesses to official history and Brecht’s theories helped to achieve this goal.
Tadashi Uchino provides a longer historical view, outlining the history of Brecht as a “displaced political playwright and theorist” in Japan. Brecht’s legacy in Japan remains inextricably linked with that of Koreya Senda, the shingeki (“new theatre”) practitioner who journeyed to Germany in 1927 to seek new ideas for a workers’ theatre. In The Threepenny Opera, Senda saw a form of performance that could fulfill the popular and leftist needs of shingeki. Senda did not even wait for the publication of Brecht’s script, but instead used the widely available Weill score and his own memory of the text to reconstruct his own freely-adapted version, The Beggar’s Play, in Tokyo in 1932. In subsequent decades, Brecht’s significance in Japan has risen and fallen along with shingeki.
The need to adapt Brecht’s ideas to American theatre of the 1960s is unmistakable in Erika Munk’s 1968 interview with Joseph Chaikin, the founding actor-director of the influential Open Theatre. Chaikin restates Brecht’s concern with balancing entertainment and instruction in the theatre. Nevertheless, Chaikin saw some of Brecht’s theatrical techniques as inappropriate for American audiences. As Chaikin saw it, the problem for American directors was to find a new way to direct Brecht’s plays, while remaining true to their own American themes and intentions.
Karen Laughlin surveys the influence of Brecht’s theories on American feminist theatre of the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. She describes how Brecht’s concepts of Gestus and alienation and his insistence that dramatic events be “historicized” was crucial to the political aims of feminist theatre. Laughlin’s article is part of an ongoing debate about the rejection, acceptance, or adaptation of theatrical realism for feminist theatre in the U.S.9
Finally, Carol Martin’s essay on Brecht and Chinese theatre discusses theatrical innovations in China and Japan at the time Brecht saw Mei Lanfang perform in Moscow and American feminists’ use of Brecht for a politically engaged theatre. Martin asks us to look at the history of the forms being used as well as the history of dramatic events when considering the implications of theatrical inventions.
In Latin America today, Brecht’s theories are more important than his plays. In Japan, where Brecht’s name was associated with the at first radical but then conservative shingeki (new theatre) of Koreya Senda, his plays are better known than his theories. In the U.S., mainstream venues produce his plays while Chicano and feminist theatre practitioners take up his theories to invent their own practices conducive to their own politics.
As the instability of local subjects and their global translations becomes evident the advent of an international style of theatre emerges. This does not necessarily negate particularity of knowledge and taste, but identifies shared techniques. Although an international style of theatre can make productions readable across cultures, it does not assure consistency of meaning in different contexts. The early twentieth century can be characterized by a new awareness of a multitude of local theatrical forms (often with a concomitant effort to preserve those forms). At the same time, the movement of individuals like Brecht accelerated the deterioration of artistic borders.
Taken together we hope the essays in this collection will provoke further thinking on Brecht’s key aesthetic theories, the process of putting his theories into practice, and the complex diffusion of his ideas in varied contexts.
NOTES
1. John Fuegi, Bertolt Brecht: Chaos According to Plan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987) 10.
2. Phyllis Rose, Jazz Cleopatra: Josephine Baker in Her Time (New York: Doubleday, 1989) 84–5.
3. When the German Parliament building caught fire, Nazi propaganda proposed that Communist arson was the cause; the Nazi’s red-baiting helped them win 43.9 percent of the vote in the March elections. Hitler subsequently disqualified the 81 Communist members of the Reichstag giving the Nazis a clear majority.
4. Ann Daly, Done Into Dance: Isadora Duncan in America (Indiana University Press, 1995) 10.
5. The German title of the essay is “Verfremdungseffekte in deder chinesischen Schauspielkunst” hence another translation of the title is “Alienation Effects in Chinese Acting.”
6. John Willett (ed. and tr.), Brecht on Theatre: The Development of an Aesthetic (New York: Hill and Wang, 1992) 99.
7. Ibid. 6.
8. Dorothy McCall, The Theatre of Jean-Paul Sartre (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969) 1–3.
9. Patricia R. Schroeder, The Feminist Possibilities of Dramatic Realism (Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996). In the first chapter of her book Schroeder summarizes and argues with feminist critiques of theatrical realism.
Part I:
1
ON CHINESE ACTING
Bertolt Brecht
Translated by Eric Bentley
In the following paper something will be said about the use of “alienation” in Chinese acting. The “alienation effect” has been used in Germany in plays of a non-Aristotelian kind, that is, in plays which are not based on empathy (einfuehlung). I refer to various attempts to act in such a manner that the spectator is prevented from feeling his way into the characters. Acceptance or rejection of the characters’ words is thus placed in the conscious realm, not, as hitherto, in the spectator’s subconscious.
The attempt to “alienate” the events being presented from the audience was made in a primitive way in the theatrical and pictorial displays of old fairs. We also find it in the circus clown’s manner of speech and in the way in which so-called “panoramas”1 are painted. The reproduction of the painting The Flight of
Charles the Bold After the Battle of Murten, often to be found on German fairgrounds, was always inadequately painted. Yet the copyist achieved an alienation effect not to be found in the original; and one can scarcely blame this on his inadequacy. The fleeing general, his horse, his retinue, and the landscape are quite consciously painted to give the impression of an extra-ordinary occasion, a forbidding catastrophe. Despite his inadequacy the painter admirably produces the effect of the unexpected; astonishment guides his brash. This effect of estrangement is also known to the Chinese actor, who uses it in a very subtle manner.
Everyone knows that the Chinese theatre makes use of many symbols. A general wears little ribbons on his shoulders, as many, in fact, as the regiments he commands. Poverty is indicated by sewing irregular patches onto silk robes, the patches being also of silk, though of a different color. The personages of a play are characterized by a particular kind of make-up, that is, simply by paint. Certain gestures with both hands represent the forcible opening of a door, and so forth. The stage stays unchanged though articles of furniture are brought on during the play. All this has been known for a long time and can scarcely be taken over by us in toto. And one is accustomed to regard an artistic phenomenon in toto—as a whole. However, if you want to study one particular effect among many you have to break with this custom.
In the Chinese theatre the “alienation effect” is achieved in the following way. The Chinese performer does not act as if, in addition to the three walls around
him there were also a fourth wall. He makes it clear that he knows he is being looked at. Thus, one of the illusions of the European stage is set aside. The audience forfeits the illusion of being unseen spectators at an event which is really taking place. The European stage has worked out an elaborate technique by which the fact that scenes are so arranged as to be easily seen by the audience is concealed. The Chinese approach renders this technique superfluous. As openly as acrobats the actors can choose those positions which show them off to best advantage.
Another expedient is this: the actor looks at himself. Presenting, let us say, a cloud, its unsuspected appearance, its gentle yet strong development, its speedy yet gradual transformation; from time to time he looks at the spectator as if to say: Isn’t it just like that? But he also looks at his own arms and legs, guiding them, examining them, in the end, perhaps praising them. If he glances at the floor or measures the space available for his act, he sees nothing in this procedure that could disturb the illusion. In this way the performer separates mimicry2 (presenting the act of observation) from gesture3 (presenting the cloud) but the latter loses nothing thereby, for the attitude of the body reacts back upon the face, gives to the face, as it were, its own expression. An expression now of complete reservation, now of utter triumph. The performer has used his face as an empty sheet of paper that can be written on by bodily movement.
The performer wishes to appear alien to the spectator. Alien to the point of arousing surprise. This he manages by seeing himself and his performance as alien. In this way the things he does on the stage become astonishing. By this craft everyday things are removed from the realm of the self-evident.
A young woman, a fisherman’s daughter, is shown on the stage, rowing a boat. She stands up and steers the (non-existent) boat with a little oar that hardly comes down to her knees. The current runs faster. Now it is harder for her to keep her balance. Now she is in a bay and rows more quietly. Well, that’s the way to row a boat. But this voyage has an historic quality, as if it had been sung in many songs, a most unusual voyage, known to everyone. Each of this famous girl’s movements has been preserved in pictures. Every bend in the river was an adventure that one knows about. The bend she is now approaching is well-known. This feeling in the spectator is called forth by the performer’s attitude. It is she who confers fame on the voyage. (The scene reminds us of the march to Budweis in Piscator’s production of The Good Soldier Schweik. Schweik’s three-day march under sun and moon to the front, which, curiously enough, he never reaches, was seen in a completely historical way, as something just as worth thinking about as Napoleon’s journey to Russia in 1812.)
To look at himself is for the performer an artful and artistic act of self-estrangement. Any empathy on the spectator’s part is thereby prevented from becoming total, that is, from being a complete self-surrender. An admirable distance from the events portrayed is achieved. This is not to say that the spectator experiences no empathy whatsoever. He feels his way into the actor as into an observer. In this manner an observing, watching attitude is cultivated.
In many ways the art of the Chinese actor seems to the western actor cold. Not that the Chinese theatre renounces the presentation of feelings! The actor presents events of considerable passionateness, but his delivery remains unimpassioned. At moments when the presented character is deeply excited, the performer takes a strand of hair between his lips and bites it. That is pretty much of a rite; there is nothing eruptive about it. Clearly it is a matter of the repetition of an event by another man, a rendering (artistic, certainly). The performer shows that this man is beside himself and he indicates the outward signs of such a state of mind. This is the proper way to express being beside oneself. (It may be improper too, but not for the stage.) Anyway a few special symptoms are chosen out of many—obviously with great deliberation. Anger is naturally distinguished from fury, hate from dislike, love from sympathy, but the various movements of feeling are sparingly presented. The pervading coolness arises from the fact that the individual is not so much the center of interest as in western theatre. True, the cult of the star has gone further in Asia than perhaps anywhere else. The spectator’s eyes positively hang on the star. The other roles give him the cue to the star, place obstacles in his way, show him off. Nevertheless, the star places himself at a distance from the role he plays in the manner just described. He guards against making the audience feel exactly what the character is feeling. Nobody will be raped by the individual he presents. This individual is not the spectator but his neighbor.
The western performer does all he can to bring the spectator as close as possible to the events and the character being presented. To this end he gets him to feel his way into him, the actor. He spends all his strength on transforming himself as completely as possible into another type of person, the type being presented. When this complete transformation is achieved, his art is pretty much exhausted. Once he is the bank clerk, the doctor, the general, he needs just as little art as the bank clerk, the doctor or the general need in real life. The act of completely transforming oneself takes a lot of trouble to accomplish. Stanislavsky provides a whole list of devices, a whole system of devices, by means of which this “creative mood” can be produced afresh at each performance. Usually the actor does not succeed for long in really feeling like the other person. He soon begins, in his exhaustion, to copy certain external features of his carriage or tone of voice, and thereby the effect on the audience is appallingly weakened. Doubtless the reason is that the creation of the Other Man was an intuitive act taking place in the subconscious. The subconscious is very hard to regulate. It has, so to speak, a bad memory.
The Chinese performer knows nothing of these difficulties. He eschews complete transformation. He confines himself at the outset to merely quoting the character. But with how much art he does this! He requires only a minimum of illusion. What he shows is worth seeing even to those who are not out of their senses. What western actor, with the exception of a comedian or so, could do what the Chinese actor Mei Lanfang does—show the elements of his craft clad in evening dress in a room with no special lights before an audience of professionals? The scene of Lear’s division of his kingdom, let us say, or Othello and the 1 ON CHINESE ACTING 15
handkerchief? He’d be like a conjurer at a fairground showing his magical tricks, which no one would want to see a second time. He would merely show how one dissembles. The hypnosis would pass and there would remain a couple of pounds of badly beaten-up mimicry, a commodity quickly thrown together for sale in the dark to customers who are in a hurry. Naturally, no western actor would arrange such a performance. Isn’t art sacrosanct? Isn’t theatrical metamorphosis a mystical process? He lays store by the fact that what he does is unconscious; it has more value for him that way. A comparison with Asiatic acting shows how deeply parsonic our art still is.
Certainly it gets harder all the time for our actors to consummate the mystery of complete transformation. Their subconscious minds’ memories are getting weaker all the time. And even when the actor is a genius it is hard to create truth out of the adulterated intuition of a member of a class society.
It is difficult for the actor to generate certain emotions and moods in himself every evening and comparatively easy to render the outward signs that accompany and denote these emotions. Certainly the transference of these emotions to the spectator, the emotional contagion, does not take place automatically. The “alienation effect” enters in at this point, not in the form of emotionlessness, but in the form of emotions which do not have to be identical with those of the presented character. The spectator can feel joy at the sight of sorrow, disgust at the sight of anger. We speak of rendering the outward signs of emotions as a way of effecting alienation. This procedure may, however, fail to do so. The actor can so render these signs and select these signs that, on the contrary, emotional contagion follows, because the actor has, while rendering the signs, generated in himself the emotions to be presented. The actor can easily stir up anger within himself by letting his voice swell and by holding his breath, also by drawing his throat muscles together so that the blood flows to his head. In this case, “alienation” is out of the question. On the other hand, “alienation” does occur when at a particular point and without transition the actor displays a deadly pale face which he has acquired artificially. (He held his face in his hands, and in his hands was some white grease paint.) If the actor exhibits at the same time an apparently undisturbed nature, his fright at this point in the play (occasioned by a piece of news or a discovery) will produce the “alienation effect.” To act in this manner is more healthy and, it seems to us, more worthy of a thinking being. It calls for a considerable knowledge of men, a considerable general intelligence, and a keen grasp of what is socially important. Obviously a creative process is going on here too. And one of a higher sort, since it belongs to the sphere of consciousness.
Obviously the “alienation effect” in no way presupposes an unnatural style of acting. One must at all costs not think of what is called Stylization. On the contrary the success of the “alienation effect” is dependent on the lightness and naturalness of the whole procedure. And when the actor comes to examine the truth of this performance—a necessary operation, which gives Stanislavsky a lot of trouble—he is not merely thrown back on his natural sensibility. He can always
be corrected by reference to reality. Does an angry man really speak like that? Does a guilty man sit like that? He can be corrected, that is, from without, by other people. His style is such that nearly every sentence could be judged by the audience. Nearly every gesture is submitted to the approval of the audience.
The Chinese actor is in no trance. He can be interrupted at any moment. There is no question of his “coming to.” After an interruption he will take up his performance at the exact place where he was interrupted. We disturb him at no mystic moment of creation. He had finished “creating” before he came on the stage. If scene building is going on while he is acting, he doesn’t mind. Stagehands hand him whatever he needs for his work quite openly. During a death scene played by Mei Lanfang a spectator sitting near me let out a startled cry at one of the actor’s gestures. Several spectators in front of us turned indignantly around and hissed: Sh! They conducted themselves as at the death of some real girl. Perhaps their behavior was right for a European production, but it was unspeakably ridiculous in a Chinese theatre. The “alienation effect” had misfired.
It is not altogether easy to regard the “alienation effect” of Chinese acting as something that can be shaken loose from the Chinese theatre and exported. The Chinese theatre seems to us uncommonly precious, its presentation of human passions merely schematic, its conception of society rigid and false. At first sight nothing in this great art seems useful in a realistic and revolutionary theatre. The motives and aims of the “alienation effect” are alien and suspect.
In the first place it is difficult, when watching the Chinese act, to rid ourselves of the feeling of strangeness that they arouse in us because we are Europeans. One must be able to imagine they achieve the “alienation effect” also in their Chinese spectators. But, and this is more difficult, we must not allow ourselves to be disturbed at the fact that the Chinese performer creates an impression of mystery for a quite different purpose from any that we can envisage. If one has learned to think dialectically one can find it impossible that a technique which is taken from the realm of magic can be used to combat magic with. The Chinese performer may intend to use the “alienation effect” to make the events on stage mysterious, incomprehensible, and uncontrollable to the audience. And yet this effect can be used to make the events mundane, comprehensible, and controllable.
The attitude of the scientist, who at first views the object of his investigation with astonishment, may resemble the attitude of a magician. Yet these apparently identical attitudes have a precisely opposite function. Whoever finds the formula 2×2=4 obvious is no mathematician; neither is the man who doesn’t know what the formula means. The man who viewed a lamp swinging on a rope with astonishment at first and found it not obvious but very remarkable that the lamp swung thus and not otherwise—such a man approached the understanding of the phenomenon and, with this, the mastery of the phenomenon. It won’t do to exclaim that this attitude is appropriate to science alone and not to art. Why shouldn’t art try (by its own means, of course) to contribute to the great social task of mastering life?
